RoutesWallet
Solo-shipped an iOS app to test whether cyclists wanted one home for routes scattered across Garmin, Strava, Komoot, and club Google Docs, then killed it when the market said no.
Problem
Cycling routes end up scattered: Garmin, Strava, Komoot, Ride with GPS, and the inevitable Google Docs a club keeps maintaining by hand. The bet was that riders wanted a single wallet to hold all of them. The real question was whether that demand actually existed.
Constraints
A solo, self-funded side project built to answer one thing: is this worth pursuing? Genuine uncertainty about demand, and no team or budget to hide behind.
Approach
Built the app solo in React Native for iOS, then ran a real market test with my cycling club rather than guessing from the outside.
Contribution
Everything: the concept, design, build and test.
Outcome
I put it in front of 12 riders from my cycling club. The reaction was weak: one used it and found it useful, one couldn't get past Strava account limitations, and most never cared enough to install it at all. The signal was clear, so I killed the project rather than push past it.
Reflection
The build was the cheap part. The point of a solo, self-funded project like this is to buy a real answer to "does anyone want this" before spending a year finding out, and the answer was no. Shipping something is easy to be proud of; stopping on the evidence is the harder discipline.